Coinciding (roughly) with the version 2.2 release of StackStorm, the Ghost2logger pack has been released.
This pack provides in essence a “Syslog sensor” that provides the user a tuple match on a Syslog entry, tuples in this case being:
Syslog Message (Actual syslog message)
MANDATORY AND
Syslog Source (IPv4 address)
The actions can then be anything … [Read more...]

When it comes to dealing with network automation, you can find yourself battling with many things, including dealing with XML and JSON data structures as you build apps that consume or spit out data.
Recently I've been using 'jq' to provide my JSON validation (i.e. I've not missed a quotation, colon, comma, curly or square bracket) when building data in JSON. Its primary … [Read more...]

What is Git?
Git is a source control manager (SCM), also known as revision control. It manages changes to documents, computer programs and large websites. Arbitrarily it can manage versioning for collections of information.
Why is it important to network engineering? Well, currently we stick the config files in a directory and forget about them. Version control can be … [Read more...]

Python on Windows with Visual Studio
Whilst I’m an OSX and Linux fan, Windows is a key operating system in any enterprise and developing network applications in a Windows environment is also an important topic to cover off. Visual Studio (VS) is a Windows IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which will also soon be available for OSX (at the time of writing, it isn't … [Read more...]

Python: Building a simple NETCONF RPC Tool
For a while now I’ve been playing with NETCONF primarily with Cisco Nexus devices. It’s struck me how difficult it is to get good information on doing trivial things like building a simple NETCONF RPC wrapper
How would this be generated for instance? This is wrapper that can be submitted to the ‘xmlagent’ or ‘netconf’ subsystem on … [Read more...]

Quite frequently I write and build code to control and harvest data from network infrastructure. Whether it's writing modules for a stack automation tool like Ansible or writing modules for run to completion scripts, code is often spawned to meet requirements. Sometimes this code is more than a little complex with many dependencies. In addition, sometimes code is written to … [Read more...]

With the current interest in network automation, it's imperative that the correct tools are chosen for the right tasks. It should be acknowledged that there isn't a single golden bullet approach and the end solution will be very much based on customer requirements, customer abilities, customer desire to learn and an often overlooked fact; the abilities of the incumbent or … [Read more...]

The cultural divide between delegation of network control such as in the case of Cisco ACI, or VMware’s NSX is a cause for questioning. These are off the shelf products designed to solve a problem that exists today but introduce new problems to the organisations that acquire them. Who controls the network and at what stratum(1)? In the case of automation and … [Read more...]